Somerset sunset, April 2010

On the way back from the seaside one evening we managed to shoot some lovely sunset photos. My wife particularly likes these, and she took them all. Her ideal sunset scene has a skeletal tree or two in front of the sunset scene. This time of year is the last chance to get these shots before the trees are all full and covered in leaves.

I’ve chosen the best six and hosted them here, you can open the large versions by clicking on the composite scene below.

Six gorgeous Somerset sunsets, April 2010

The six pictures are all approximately 2Mpix images, they have just been cropped down a little but not too much, so they might be useful for various bits of design work, please feel free to borrow them. The pictures were taken with a Canon camcorder with a good lens, the pictures look nice and crisp in their full size pixel preview.

The best part of the site is the audio/video media page, lots of great audio tracks to listen to to hear the solo and ensemble playing. There’s one video there at the moment too, hopefully more to follow.

Classical Event Music page banner

If you want to book a great classical music live performance for your special event go and check out classicaleventmusic, listen to the samples and contact us using the form on the page.

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese aeasthetic which embraces objects of art with imperfections, roughness and asymmetry. It’s a kind of art I liked without even knowing there was a name for it, until now… More than once the Design Reviews blog has discussed eroded, aged, worn, haltoned and other ‘lo-fi’ effects in illustrator and vector graphics in general.

distressed, worn and reliced vs brand spanking new

Guitar enthusiasts have been buying into hand-made and artificially aged or ‘reliced’ guitars for quite a while now, look at the picture above. A relic will have quite a premium on the price tag! Just think of how many years you would have to own and play a guitar to make it look that used. Quote: “Fender’s Relic line accounts for more than 12% of its $5 million annual sales.” Another very popular market for aged and worn appearance is clothing; think of faded stonewashed jeans and distressed leather jackets. Of course don’t forget antiques either.

As I noted earlier the Wabi-Sabi idea can be put into your illustration and logo work quite easily now with the modern versions of illustrator which are less about pure lines and shapes than before. There’s a lot of vector tools that can cross over into areas that were once Photoshop only avenues.

I have a couple of other articles planned about Wabi-Sabi style graphics, beauty and design coming up which I think will be very interesting. And I hope to put up some polls for feedback too. Come back next week!

Design Reviews T-shirt Obama edition

The quality of the design is only matched by the quality of the material! The shirt is made of 100% certified combed organic cotton, with twin needle stitching at the neck, sleeves and hem. AND it’s not produced in a sweat shop in a third world country either.

The design was lovingly created with a paid for commercial full copy of Adobe Illustrator, thereby keeping workers in the USA in employment. The fetching background Obama was realised with the help of the wonderful little program I have reviewed previously, Raster.

These shirts are a limited edition with no more than 500 being produced. One shirt costs 25UKP or 35USD, go to our merchandise page and order lots NOW!

Sonoran logo, it's so good, can it be original?!?!

There are lots of design web pages illustrating this error, or plagiarism. Look at this one for example. So what do you do? I heard about an interesting new technology recently on a more geeky website. It described a new kind of search engine, not just a normal image search but you could search for ‘similar images’. A few weeks ago I’d already tried a web page that harnessed Flikr to find images of similar colours; the Flikr Color Selectr. This is a cool web page to browse but not useful for the purpose I set out at the beginning of this article.

There are a few alternatives I have found to address the wish for searching through images for similarity, unfortunately some of them are just previews and presentations about what they are going to do in the future;

• Imprezzeo
  
• GazoPa – needs someone to invite you!?! You can use it from ‘facebook’, which I’ve never looked at, according to a Reuters story
• Microsoft live search (couldn’t find this feature, but it’s been touted)
• Typhoon images similarity search – only works for typhoons!

All the above were basically useless to me! But there was one that worked and showed promise, though by their own admission the image database held was relatively small. The winner is;

• TinEye

Yes, exactly what I wanted! I had to make an account though, which was really easy. Then you upload the image and click the search similar button… In the case of the logo I’d designed(above) it came up with no matches! So I feel like it must be quite original. When I uploaded it I just uploaded the symbol from the logo, just to make it easier for the algorithm.

If you know any different, or if you know of better ‘similar image search’ engines please let me know in the comments section. Thanks, Mark.

What has that got to do with Design Reviews? Well the huge robot Gort is a very cool robot design and I was sidetracked last night while designing a logo to do a version of Gort in Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s pretty nice and you can see it below.

Gort

Also out of huge generosity and Christmas spirit I have uploaded some ‘Gort wallpaper’ for your desktop. It’s available in lots of sizes to match your screen 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024 and a big one at 1365×1024. Also even more incredibly I’ve uploaded the Adobe Illustrator (v8 for compatibility) file for you to download, to see how it’s drawn or so you can modify it, such as move the ‘klaatu barada nikto’ text around to suit your own desktop. Please if you do anything like that write a little comment on my page, or DIGG it or something!

Anyway all these shops have many kinds of logos, some don’t, they just have some Chinese writing. Last week on my way to Taichung City (pop. 1,064,440) I shot these logos with my phone-cam, an old Sony K800i. Partly because of my inspiration from LogoDesignLove and partly because some of the logos are cool, stylish or funny. Take a look below, 15 logos in 15 minutes…

Traveling to Taichung city centre, I shot these logos with my cameraphone

Have you every ventured into Pants Kingdom or La Fatte? Everyone must recognise Domino’s Pizza. Now I wish I’d spent more time taking some more/better shots.

Cheers, Mark

It seems so, even clients have asked “no 3D effects”, not that I wanted to do any… So it seems like it’s a thing to avoid, a furry dice of the graphic design world now. In fact there has been a consciously flat movement for many years, flat colours, no gradients, no shadows and no 3D. However it seems perspective effects are still quite popular and isometric effects have been cool for a few years. What do you think, is 3D often used to put lipstick on a pig?

What to do? Illustrator has a couple of likely tools – roughen and scribble. They don’t really provide any kind of corrosion. In the old days this is what we would have done to age some text; print it on the laser and blow it up on the photocopier a few times at max magnification. Between copies you could rough up the sheets of paper a bit, crinkle it a bit, depends what you wanted.

3000 Recordings

Anyway that was a long time ago. Now it’s easier to use Photoshop and some spatter brushing, the photocopy and stamp and threshold controls, a bit of the dodge tool perhaps. Then you can bring that into Illustrator and vectorise it if you wish to use it in a logo. That’s what I did and I’m pleased with the subtle and realistic results. What do you think?

The Ebbs music CD covers currently available

If you are interested in CD and LP covers there is a great resource on the web which you might not know about – lpcoverlover.com. This is a great site with some of the most bizarre LP covers you have ever seen.